Magic Banquet (12 page)

Solin asked, “Why wasn’t Aja given first
bite? She’s the eldest now.”

The Chef didn’t look at all surprised at
what had happened to her. “The wear and tear of years amounts to
nothing. It’s the quantity and quality of dining that brings
distinction. A man is the sum of his meals.”

Solin turned his sharp chin away from the
offered carving knife.

Aja couldn’t be the only one to ask for a
cut. “You must want to know something.”

“Wanting is not deserving,” Solin said.

“Would you learn something for me?”

He inclined his head. She took it as a sign
of interest.

Aja would eat the knowledge of her mother
herself. She needed another secret for Solin to taste. She looked
about the Banquet for inspiration and spied the dragon emblems on
the lord’s glove. The Chef had mentioned something about serving
dragons.

“If we’re eating dragons later,” she said,
“we should learn about them first. It’d be safer.”

Solin ran his fingers through his long hair.
He nodded.

The Chef extended the knife, with a morsel
of pink on top. “I know the location of dragon lore by heart, just
below the left gill.”

Solin took the meat in hand, then ate it. He
chewed, his eyes growing wider and wider until they were all
whites.

“What’s it like?” she asked. “What are you
seeing?”

He rolled onto his back, clutching his head.
He moaned, in pain or wonder.

“Is the knowledge terrible?” Aja clasped his
hand. His tattoo design had sharp edges, but it felt smooth like
normal skin. “I shouldn’t have told you to eat it.”

The Chef said, “He bit off a vast topic, but
he’ll digest it soon enough.”

Aja held Solin’s hand between her two
gnarled ones. The pouch with the Plum of Beauty pressed against the
blade of her hipbone. She could take the fruit, eat it before he
regained his senses, but she didn’t. Stealing was wrong.
Besides, what good is beauty to me now?

The Chef offered the salmon to the
swordsman. He asked for something she couldn’t hear, but the Chef
spoke loud enough.

“This is the Salmon of Knowledge, not
prophecy. You can’t ask to know the future.”

In front of Aja, Solin’s eyes stopped
rolling. He focused on her. His hand pulled out of hers.

“Was it that awful?” she asked. “I’m sorry I
chose dragons for you.”

“It was…it was wings and clouds and swimming
up waterfalls, sleeping mountains and deep thoughts, a voice of
thunder, a temple of gold, breaking claws and shedding scales,
anger that burns cities, so many women dead, the taste of
them—Aaah! I must forget that. I mustn’t know.”

He swayed upright and gulped from his
cup.

Aja startled at the voice of the Chef. “What
secret will you eat?”

Sixth Course,
Part II:

Found and Lost

The Salmon of Knowledge hovered in front of
Aja on a dark-grained board. Bands of white fat rippled through the
orange-glazed flesh. The steaming knowledge made her feel warm all
over and woozy.

She glanced at Solin, but his traumatic
taste of the salmon only proved its power. The fish would reveal
her mother.

“I see you’ve chosen,” the Chef said. “Guide
my hand.”

Aja frowned as she rested her fingers on
his. She had no idea where in the fish the knowledge lay. Blinking,
she looked again, and yes, her thumb was smaller than the Chef’s
pinkie.

His hand drifted under her touch. His knife
angled toward the salmon’s upturned snout.

“The right cheek.” The Chef scooped out a
pad of flesh with a flick of his knife. “This is a knowingness of
the feminine. Hmmm…The portion may be too large.”

“I want to know my mother.” Aja covered her
mouth. She had spoken loudly.

“The knowledge of mothers, then.” The knife
flashed across the board, cutting a sliver of meat from the cheek.
So small, it disappeared when the Chef lifted it closer.

“Permit me.” He angled the blade between her
lips.

Her face twitched, but she didn’t turn away.
When he flipped the knife, she held in a scream. Heat spread over
her tongue, not from a bloody gash, but from the salmon morsel that
had dropped into her mouth.

Swallowing blacked out all sight of the
Chef, Solin, and the dining hall. Aja plunged into memories that
were not hers.

A woman sang her baby to sleep. A mother
laughed and leaped when her girl took her first steps. The wobbly
children brought such joy to life, and they babbled so much truth.
A blind mother was led by the tiny hand of her daughter. What a
blessing to belong to a family, and what grief. Another mother
cried over an empty cradle.

Other animals were also mothers. A lioness
growled among the reeds, hoisting her cub by the nape of its neck.
Eagles squawked over grey-speckled eggs in cliff nests. A djinn
mother breathed a spark to life on her rippling palm.

All the mothers of all creatures of all
time.

Too much. Too much.
Aja’s mind was
being ripped apart. She closed her eyes, but that didn’t help. If
only she could cough out the bit of salmon. But where was it? Where
was she? She had lost all sense of her own body in the flood of
memories.

Aja focused on her own mother. Neera, her
name was Neera. She smiled down at her newborn daughter with the
last of her strength. Her beautiful eyes of dusk black drooped,
then closed. Would Aja have to watch her mother die?

She lived, not as a queen but as a queenly
woman. She wore a wealth of amulets, and anklets jangled with every
step. On her face, makeup was art. She hid stretch marks from her
pregnancy under fine fabrics given by her suitors.

Sorrow lodged in Aja’s throat when she saw
her mother had no patience for children. Sleepless nights broke her
smiles into scowls. One day, baby Aja had made a mess, and her
mother knocked her down with the heel of a foot.

“Don’t kick the baby,” Father said.

“She kicked first, inside me,” Mother said.
“The ungrateful pox rat.”

“You shouldn’t say that.” Her father was a
shadow, a smear, a fragment of memory. “Babies can’t speak, but
they understand.”

“This one can’t. Look at those idiot
eyes.”

The baby wailed. The cry reverberated in
Aja, louder, harsher, a high screech that shattered. Her mother
hadn’t cared. Aja tried to shield her eyes.
Make it
stop.

More visions of her mother forced themselves
on Aja. An empty bed, a shadow on the door. Of leaving, of never
coming back.

Her mother should’ve died. That would’ve
hurt less. But she lived. She reappeared in Oasis City, married to
a wealthy man, mother to his child. He had servants to tend to
Neera’s new babies, and she thought about them little and Aja even
less, a merest flicker of curiosity.

“I hate you! I wish I’d never known you.”
Aja shouted it across the years and miles. “You left us.”

Her anger tore apart the panorama of
mothers. Aja batted away scenes of women kissing fathers, of
bouncing their babies, of happy families. She swam through the
knowledge back to her real body.

She gasped, found herself sprawled among
silk-tasseled pillows, on a silver-embroidered rug, in a
candle-glowing ballroom. She pushed herself up. Her elbows popped.
Sliding her fingers over the carpet, she found the smoothness of a
polished cup. She lifted it.

The djinn tipped the amphora, and from its
tunnel neck sluiced darkness. Or, perhaps, the water only looked
black because the cup was made of ebony. Aja didn’t hesitate. The
river water tasted of nothing. Aja couldn’t remember it being hot
or cold, only that it quenched.

Aja thought of the time her mother had
kicked her, and she washed the memory away. She drowned everything
of Neera. Aja had been happier hoping.

“Goodbye, Mother.” She lifted her cup to
celebrate the blissful absence of pain gone.

She tilted her head. What had been her
mother’s name? Aja was free of it.

Chewing the thin flap of her lip, she was
bothered by a half-thought tickling her skull. Had she lost
something else, too, a memory she had held dear? Whatever it was
had been swept away in the flood of forgetting.

Ember-hued nail beds caught Aja’s eye. She
blinked up at the djinn.

“You’re a mother,” Aja said. An aftertaste
of salmon stuck in the back of her throat as memories streamed
across her mind unbidden. The water hadn’t made her forget them
all. “Your son was like a candle flame. You played hide and seek
between the stars and the sand dunes. He’d change into a baby
jumping spider, or a green rock, or a breeze.”

The djinn did not show surprise on her face
as a human might. Steam rose from the amphora she held, and her
eyes sparked.

“One day your son went too far, into the
city, to hide as a lamp flame—”

“Do you know of him?” The djinn gripped Aja
with unseen hands of wind, hoisting her to eye level. “Did you see
what he’s become? Does he burn brightly?”

The son had been trapped in a brass lamp. A
man had threatened to drown him, and the djinn had promised to
serve the owner of the lamp to save her son. He had been let go.
Once the mother djinn parted from the smaller flame, the knowledge
ended.

“I’m sorry.” Aja’s eyes burned from the
nearness of the djinn. “I don’t know. I’m so sorry. It’s
only….”

The djinn released Aja with a gust.
“What?”

“I’d like to think my parents did something
so brave for me. I never knew them.”

Aja frowned. She had boasted to other
children in the past about her father, as if she had known him. Had
she been lying? She tried to remember something, anything about
either parent. Darkness flowed through her.

Her cup was half empty with Water of
Oblivion. Aja wondered if she had drank from that. She must have.
She had destroyed the memories of her parents. Why? Oh, why had she
done it?

Her knuckles hurt when she rested her head
in her hands. She was adrift, without past or future. She must’ve
purged memories of her family out of disgust, or spite, but even so
she wanted them back. Aja would’ve traded her last bracelet—even
her last day alive—to know.

She had eaten the salmon and gained the
knowledge of every mother in the world except for the one who
mattered most.
The Chef tricked me.
Aja quivered and ached
all over.
Every course, it’s only gotten worse.

Leaving would mean dying of old age, but
better that than staying. Only doom remained for her here in this
hall of splendor. Aja vowed not to eat another crumb at the
Banquet.

And then she smelled the next course.

Side Dish:

THE LORD’S TALE

I was born into ambition, fed a steady diet
of impatience, and taught only to be reckless when it suited my
desires. I learned well. Before reaching my age of majority I had
ruined my family’s good name. I succeeded in losing everything.
Only then could I find true power.

Now I rule over nowhere and everywhere. I am
the regret between the cobwebs of a deserted house. I am the creek
in the floorboards behind you. I am the friend you glimpse at night
who turns out to be a stranger. I am the unknown and the eerily
familiar. I am the green-mirror flash of eyes in the darkness from
a black tomcat. I am the fire that burns so beautifully across the
city. I am the priceless ring cut from the hand of a dead king. I
am doom. I am delight. I am gone with the dawn.

You cannot live without me. Why would you
want to? The only thing man fears more than death is boredom.
Otherwise you wouldn’t have come to this Banquet. These masterful
delicacies were not made by my hand, but the Chef belongs to
me.

I have a plan, a dark dream, a vision for a
future lit by twilight. The lands could have many such Banquets.
Not all as ambitious, perhaps. They might not serve food. But be
assured, their fare would be as decadent.

With the help of this toothsome young lady,
Ryn, I could make it so. But let’s not talk of business tonight.
Drink like there is no tomorrow. Eat because there is nothing truer
than pleasure. Only in revelry can we for a screaming moment forget
that a human life amounts to nothing, and after death, oblivion
awaits.

Now, who’s hungry?

Seventh Course:

TAOTIE DUMPLINGS

SERVED WITH FOX-BLESSED CASHEW MILK

An aroma of ginger and rapture billowed from
the kitchen. So strong, the scent felt like bathing in fresh
noodles, with salty sauce, chives, and meat chunks. It smelled
close to pork but tastier, crisper, deeper with flavors of duck,
and higher in fluttering sighs. The perfume of food hollowed out
Aja and filled her with hunger.

Beside Aja, Janny sniffed so loudly and long
it sounded like a muffled scream. She smiled as if her pain from
the apple seed were forgotten. “Well, slather me with lard and
slide me naked over ice! Just bring me to the end of that smell
rainbow.”